Barcelona Metropolis

Music is like water that slips through your fingers: just what is the nature of this ephemeral thing, held to be the most abstract and universal language? Is there some mathematical formula to define its essence? People have been trying since antiquity to grasp the specific character of this art that is found in every culture, without reaching any conclusion, and the search goes on to this day, when, in spite of the progress of science, the questions remain unsolved.

Musicology is the science that has traditionally studied the phenomena relating to music, its evolution and its relation to human beings and society, although over the past few decades other disciplines have been added that have contributed a new approach, breaking down preconceived notions and mythicized views based on a romantic outlook. Musical technology, artificial intelligence, neurosciences and studies of musical cognition are some of the more innovative areas in that respect. At present, one of the most influential experts on artificial intelligence applied to music is the French scientist François Pachet, head of the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab, where the next generation of artificial intelligence tools for musicians is now being developed.

The first composition by a computer was debuted in 1956, the Illiac Suite for string quartet, by Lejaren Hiller. Pachet, however, has gone a step further and published the first album created completely through artificial intelligence, Hello World. The artists taking part used Flow Machines technology to select a group of songs (such as Beethoven’s Ode to Joy) and Pachet designed an algorithm to learn the style and then apply it to his own compositions. The surprising result shows that talent is not the exclusive territory of human beings.

Neurosciences have taken on music in the course of their quest to design therapies that are more effective and less aggressive. It has been shown that music can help to develop certain cognitive skills and it has been proven highly effective for speeding up musculoskeletal recovery. Jean-Julien Aucouturier, a researcher at IRCAM, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, is studying how sounds can affect a person’s emotions subconsciously. In his research, he has explored the emotional DNA of sounds and created technologies that allow them to be modified to attain a given emotional state. This research has a wide range of applications, such as treatment for people affected by autism or who are unable to communicate.

At the same time, they have developed the Angus software, which allows a component of harshness to be added to different types of sounds, such as the human voice, a musical instrument or sounds of nature, to allow study of the emotional effect on people from a neurological standpoint. Likewise outstanding in the area of brain studies is the work done by Fang Liu at the University of Reading, which have shown a direct correlation between autism and congenital amusia, the inability to distinguish or reproduce musical tones, since music and language are processed in overlapping areas of the brain. There is a broad field of study here, since although it has been shown that the brain has a specialised area for sound perception, no specific region has yet been detected for musical perception. In fact, a team at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, led by Sam Norman-Haignere, is set to start up a new technique based upon magnetic resonance with the aim of discovering and studying that region.

The area of musicology, the most conventional area, but no less valid for all that, has continued to advance along several parallel lines of study that are contributing new information on the role of music. For example, Álvaro Torrente, director of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, has examined emotions in baroque Italian opera of the 18^th century, which was well-known for its aim of “moving the emotions”. Torrente has taken nine hundred operas by three hundred different composers based upon the twenty-seven librettos written by Pietro Metastasio, an 18^th-century Italian writer and poet. He aims to create a body of four thousand arias in digital format, for computer analysis searching for connections between specific dramatic situations and given musical characteristics.

From the standpoint of history, the researchers Anna Alberni and Stefano Cingolani, at the University of Barcelona (UB), are beginning a research project on the role of troubadours and minstrels at the court of the Kingdom of Aragon. They will study five thousand documents to determine their importance in the development of Catalan poetry. Margarita Díaz–Andreu, likewise working at UB, has examined the cave art of primitive societies produced at locations considered sacred, caves with special acoustic properties, such as echoes or resonance. She aims to analyse the psychological effect that such places might have on humans, in order to explain the relationship between sound, sacred experience and landscape in pre-modern societies.

Another of the more intriguing approaches to current musical studies is found at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne. There, Martin Rohrmeier and his team are blending music theory, computer science and cognition to analyse the structural parallels between tonal music compositions and linguistic syntax. “The structure of tonal music works contains elements that cannot be explained in linear terms (where an element depends directly on the preceding element), but that are inserted into each other or are interrelated in a hierarchical way, as in language” according to that expert.

These are some of the research endeavours that were presented last summer at a conference held last summer at the Pompeu Fabra University, one of the focal points of the study of music from a technological standpoint. Xavier Serra, in charge of the European Research Music Conference, where some twenty speakers sponsored by the European Union met, directs the CompMusic Project. The aim of the project is to create technologies for musical analysis that take specific cultural characteristics into account, which has led him to study Chinese, Indian and Turkish music.